I've dipped my toe into blogdom...

[Brovion]

Or buy the M&S mini sprouts which being a sproutophobe, I actually like. You can eat them straight after cooking.

Oooh, thanks for the tip. If they only need a bit of cooking I'll wait until the start of Advent.

 

[The Large One]

Genuinely enjoying your blogging, TLO.

Dank u, meneer.

 

[The Large One]

I say this EVERY year: If you're having Brussels sprouts for Christmas they should be put on to boil on Bonfire Night. Some say Halloween but I think that's too early, they need to have some chewyness on the Big Day.

Or buy the M&S mini sprouts which being a sproutophobe, I actually like. You can eat them straight after cooking.

Oooh, thanks for the tip. If they only need a bit of cooking I'll wait until the start of Advent.

Sprouts are the Devil's snotballs.

I only cook them at Christmas out of obligation. In so doing, I cut them up, and fry with in bacon and balsamic vinegar.

 

[Hillian1]

When are you doing the Paella recipe [MENTION=257]The Large One[/MENTION] ?

 

[The Large One]

When are you doing the Paella recipe [MENTION=257]The Large One[/MENTION] ?

Soon.

I ideally want to write about it once I've just cooked it, then I can take a photo, rather than keep nicking pics off t'interweb.

I cooked a pork & chorizo jambalaya last night - that turned out pretty well.

 

[The Large One]

Especially for [MENTION=16843]Hillian1[/MENTION] - and anyone else...

Is cookbook

 

[The Large One]

For the day shift foodies.

 

[Hillian1]

Especially for [MENTION=16843]Hillian1[/MENTION] - and anyone else...

Is cookbook

Cheers Al,

One thing I do with Paella is ALWAYS use live mussels cooked in wine, the wine can be used to make stock and the mussels are much better when that fresh.

Glad you mentioned the saffron, it is a absolute MUST, I cooked one without it once using Tumeric only and the whole lot went in the bin.

 

[The Large One]

Cheers Al,

One thing I do with Paella is ALWAYS use live mussels cooked in wine, the wine can be used to make stock and the mussels are much better when that fresh.

Glad you mentioned the saffron, it is a absolute MUST, I cooked one without it once using Tumeric only and the whole lot went in the bin.

You can get away with no saffron, but only just.

Good shout about the mussels, and remember to ignore the urban myth about mussels not opening when being cooked.

 

[Mellor 3 Ward 4]

Found Saffron harder to find recently. No idea why.

paella is a no go without it.

 

[Mellor 3 Ward 4]

Oh, and good blog BTW.

 

[The Large One]

Found Saffron harder to find recently. No idea why.

paella is a no go without it.

Whereabouts are you?

How far 'saaf of the water?'

Oh, and I've just written one about a PEASY baked trout.

 

[The Large One]

Barbecues in November is the next topic of conversation...

Large Als cookbook

 

[BUTTERBALL]

Like the blog. Tip for winter BBQ. Boil some new potatoes. Add salt, pepper, butter and crushed garlic. Agitate the spuds in the pot with the added ingredients. Pour them out into foil and wrap. Finish on the BBQ where they caramelise. Turn the foil parcel once or twice so they don't burn, only need about 5-10 mins. Good winter warmers.

 

[Vegas Seagull]

You can get away with no saffron, but only just.

Good shout about the mussels, and remember to ignore the urban myth about mussels not opening when being cooked.

it's not, they either don't open cos they're dead or not cooked enough..neither ideal & for throwing the odd one not worth the risk (Michael Winner has never recovered from an Oyster incident a few years back)
Monkfish works well in paella, great taste & holds together beautifully
Good read

 

[The Large One]

it's not, they either don't open cos they're dead or not cooked enough..neither ideal & for throwing the odd one not worth the risk (Michael Winner has never recovered from an Oyster incident a few years back)
Monkfish works well in paella, great taste & holds together beautifully
Good read

Cheers.

This might be worth a read, if you don't want to waste closed mussels. From Australian Broadcasting Corporation...


Mussel myth an open and shut case

People love their seafood. We humans have been eating mussels for thousands of years.

Now, I once believed two things about mussels. First, that you should eat them only in months that had the letter 'R' in them. And that second, you should throw away the ones that don't open when you cook them.

How easy it is to be wrong!

The first mussel myth is simple to debunk. The advice to eat mussels only in months with the letter 'R' applies only to the northern hemisphere, when the months of September through to April are when mussels are supposedly "in".

That will teach me to get my gastronomic advice from European books.

The second myth is more complicated to correct.

Look at the influential cookery books of the 1960s, such as Larousse Gastronomique in 1965 and Italian Food by Elizabeth David in 1966. These books made absolutely no mention of discarding unopened mussels.

The myth seems to have been started by the English food writer, Jane Grigson in her 1973 publication, Fish Book.

The exact quote is:

"Throw away any mussels that refuse to open."

According to Nick Ruello, the mussel expert and fisheries biologist, this advice stuck as tightly as a barnacle.

By the 1970s, some 13 per cent of cookery books were agreeing with Jane Grigson; and by the 1980s, this had risen to 31 per cent. By the 1990s, there was almost universal agreement among the cookbook writers — none of whom were fisheries biologists.

Indeed, Nick Ruello personally contacted two prominent Australian cookbook writers and asked them why they wrote this. Their replies were that the information:

"came from their young research assistants who did much of the work in preparing the latest book."

It was as though once the advice had been written down, it kept on spreading because other writers quoted it, without checking if it was correct or not.

And it was not.

Nick Ruello got involved in this mussel myth because he was commissioned to write a report for Seafood Services Australia, on the rather specific topic of adding value to mussels.

And of course, along the way, he cooked and ate over 30 batches of mussels, of various sizes, ranging from 21 to 111 mussels. Now the mussel has a shell with two halves. Thanks to some elastic ligaments, these two halves have a natural tendency to be open.

To keep them closed, the mussel has muscles. It uses its specific adductor muscles. When we cook them, the heat can have a few effects on the adductor muscles that keep the two halves of their shells stuck together.

Sometimes, the heat can denature the proteins in the adductor muscles so that they simply disintegrate, or sometimes, it can make one or both ends of the adductor muscles come unstuck from the shell.

Nick Ruello found that 1.9 per cent of mussels opened early. These mussels opened before they had been cooked long enough to kill any potential pathogens in them. If you removed them from the stove once they opened and ate these mussels, you would be at risk of food poisoning. But you would get a strong hint from the texture of the meat — it would be unappetizing, jelly-like, un-coagulated, and stuck to the perimeter of the shell.

At the other extreme, he found that some 11.5 per cent of mussels remained closed after a so-called "normal" cooking time. When he forced them open with a knife, every single one was both adequately cooked and safe to eat.

So, according to Nick Ruello, even if the adductor muscles refuse to bow to the heat, the meat is still safe to eat. But on the occasions when he cooked them for a further 90 seconds, about one-seventh of them still remained shut.

And in the mussels that finally did open, thanks to the overcooking, the meat was now shrunken and tough.

The best way to check the safety of mussels is to check them before you cook them.

Mussels have such a small mass that if they are invaded by a pathogen or germ, they will be overwhelmed almost immediately, and will smell bad.

If we use the experimental evidence, and stop throwing out cooked mussels that stubbornly refuse to open, we can stop wasting each year some 370 tonnes of perfectly good seafood worth around $3 million.

So use a little brain muscle, and put the mussel where your mouth is.

 

[The Large One]

Like the blog. Tip for winter BBQ. Boil some new potatoes. Add salt, pepper, butter and crushed garlic. Agitate the spuds in the pot with the added ingredients. Pour them out into foil and wrap. Finish on the BBQ where they caramelise. Turn the foil parcel once or twice so they don't burn, only need about 5-10 mins. Good winter warmers.

Like. Cheers, bloke.

 

[Vegas Seagull]

Cheers.

This might be worth a read, if you don't want to waste closed mussels. From Australian Broadcasting Corporation...


Mussel myth an open and shut case

People love their seafood. We humans have been eating mussels for thousands of years.

Now, I once believed two things about mussels. First, that you should eat them only in months that had the letter 'R' in them. And that second, you should throw away the ones that don't open when you cook them.

How easy it is to be wrong!

The first mussel myth is simple to debunk. The advice to eat mussels only in months with the letter 'R' applies only to the northern hemisphere, when the months of September through to April are when mussels are supposedly "in".

That will teach me to get my gastronomic advice from European books.

The second myth is more complicated to correct.

Look at the influential cookery books of the 1960s, such as Larousse Gastronomique in 1965 and Italian Food by Elizabeth David in 1966. These books made absolutely no mention of discarding unopened mussels.

The myth seems to have been started by the English food writer, Jane Grigson in her 1973 publication, Fish Book.

The exact quote is:

"Throw away any mussels that refuse to open."

According to Nick Ruello, the mussel expert and fisheries biologist, this advice stuck as tightly as a barnacle.

By the 1970s, some 13 per cent of cookery books were agreeing with Jane Grigson; and by the 1980s, this had risen to 31 per cent. By the 1990s, there was almost universal agreement among the cookbook writers — none of whom were fisheries biologists.

Indeed, Nick Ruello personally contacted two prominent Australian cookbook writers and asked them why they wrote this. Their replies were that the information:

"came from their young research assistants who did much of the work in preparing the latest book."

It was as though once the advice had been written down, it kept on spreading because other writers quoted it, without checking if it was correct or not.

And it was not.

Nick Ruello got involved in this mussel myth because he was commissioned to write a report for Seafood Services Australia, on the rather specific topic of adding value to mussels.

And of course, along the way, he cooked and ate over 30 batches of mussels, of various sizes, ranging from 21 to 111 mussels. Now the mussel has a shell with two halves. Thanks to some elastic ligaments, these two halves have a natural tendency to be open.

To keep them closed, the mussel has muscles. It uses its specific adductor muscles. When we cook them, the heat can have a few effects on the adductor muscles that keep the two halves of their shells stuck together.

Sometimes, the heat can denature the proteins in the adductor muscles so that they simply disintegrate, or sometimes, it can make one or both ends of the adductor muscles come unstuck from the shell.

Nick Ruello found that 1.9 per cent of mussels opened early. These mussels opened before they had been cooked long enough to kill any potential pathogens in them. If you removed them from the stove once they opened and ate these mussels, you would be at risk of food poisoning. But you would get a strong hint from the texture of the meat — it would be unappetizing, jelly-like, un-coagulated, and stuck to the perimeter of the shell.

At the other extreme, he found that some 11.5 per cent of mussels remained closed after a so-called "normal" cooking time. When he forced them open with a knife, every single one was both adequately cooked and safe to eat.

So, according to Nick Ruello, even if the adductor muscles refuse to bow to the heat, the meat is still safe to eat. But on the occasions when he cooked them for a further 90 seconds, about one-seventh of them still remained shut.

And in the mussels that finally did open, thanks to the overcooking, the meat was now shrunken and tough.

The best way to check the safety of mussels is to check them before you cook them.

Mussels have such a small mass that if they are invaded by a pathogen or germ, they will be overwhelmed almost immediately, and will smell bad.

If we use the experimental evidence, and stop throwing out cooked mussels that stubbornly refuse to open, we can stop wasting each year some 370 tonnes of perfectly good seafood worth around $3 million.

So use a little brain muscle, and put the mussel where your mouth is.

So, the 1/7th that still fail to open were 'shrunken' & the ones that have germs are 'small mass'...tell me the difference?

 

[edna krabappel]

Like. Cheers, bloke.

I like the sound of them. Can you do them next week, as I'm a bit scared of that aubergine stuff you were on about

 

[The Large One]

So, the 1/7th that still fail to open were 'shrunken' & the ones that have germs are 'small mass'...tell me the difference?

That's because, as he points out, they were over-cooked.

The point being made is that he is saying that smelling them will show whether you should eat them or not, not specifically that the mussels being closed is a sign of their edibility (is that a word?).